Women who leave their marriages and children break one of society's biggest taboos. Christine Spines comes from two generations of wives who did just that. Would she be the third?

Late last summer, my family relocated from Los Angeles to a picturesque town on the Hudson River. It's the kind of place where homemade ice cream and antiques stores abound and weekend visitors gaze longingly at the storefront real estate postings, contemplating a simple life in a refurbished farmhouse. Unfortunately, I wasn't one of them. From the moment I arrived, I felt constrained by small-town life, with its tyrannical predictability and smug sense of safety. I cringed at the prospect of waving at the same five familiar faces every time I left the house. I knew I still belonged in the sun-washed anonymity of the David Hockney tableau I'd abandoned when my husband took a job in New York City. We'd ended up in the suburbs because he hadn't wanted to thrust our eight-year-old son into the urban morass.

More From ELLE

Every part of me wished to flee the relentless family-oriented intimacy of my new home. It didn't help that my 10-year-old marriage, the second for me, had long been sputtering and stalling, some days refusing to start at all. We'd both hoped a change of scenery would inspire us, and, with the help of a therapist, things actually seemed to be improving, but not quickly enough.

To take the edge off my homesickness, I took to stealing away into the woods to smoke cigarettes in the only place I was guaranteed not to run into anyone. I'd quit years ago, but this felt like a necessary concession to my need for an escape. When I started poring over Craigslist ads for apartments in cities near and far, however, I got more worried. I'd begun to hear the call of an old voice, urging me to get the hell out of this place.

I come from two generations of women who abandoned their families for young Byronic men of mystery. My maternal grandmother fled her husband and four children to run off with a flamenco guitar player. (I know, it reads like a throwaway Woody Allen joke.) Some 25 years later, my mother pulled a series of similar maneuvers, coming and going throughout my childhood. And I left my first husband, the father of my then toddler son, for a younger man, a poet.

I feel like I've been running from this pernicious legacy of absence ever since my sophomore year in college, when my mother bailed, fittingly, just as I had plunged into reading Anna Karenina in a seminar ominously titled "Fictions of Isolation." Tolstoy's masterpiece pitched me into a neurotic panic that had me convinced I carried the same defective gene that caused Anna to self-destruct. I was both intrigued and repulsed by the book, compulsively reading pivotal passages about when Anna reaches the point of no return—to her family, to her lover, to herself. I was haunted by the way Anna allowed herself to be lured away from her devoted (if dull) husband and school-age child by the promise of six months of white-hot sex with her callow toy soldier. Anna was self-aware and sensitive enough to know better. And yet, any wisdom she'd acquired—and even the threat of complete social exile—failed to protect her from the brute force of her desire.

Though I wasn't able to admit it to myself at the time, my interest in Anna Karenina probably had more to do with making sense of what compelled my own mother to choose a man over me than concern for my future relationships. Women, of course, are expected to come equipped with a nurturing reflex, and while we moderns don't have to subsume our identities to our children, when push comes to shove, we're expected to put them first. A woman who abandons her child violates a taboo that transcends class, culture, and geography. It's a transgression so extreme we don't have a term for it. There are deadbeat dads, but what do we call vanishing moms? When one (rarely) turns up in books and movies, she's treated as a deviant and punished accordingly: We know what befell Anna Karenina, and just over a hundred years later, Meryl Streep's restless front-wave feminist in Kramer vs. Kramer was vilified for leaving her child behind to go off to "find herself."

My mother opened an art deco furniture gallery on Melrose Avenue in 1974, before the street became a mecca of celebrity hairstylists and designer boutiques. It was a tough gig that required her to tend her store six days a week and spend every other waking hour scouring yard sales and flea markets for junk she could flip for a profit. She survived as others came and went, primarily because she knew how to spot someone who didn't know the value of what they had, the sucker who was using an Eames chair to prop up his broken Betamax. It also didn't hurt that she looked like a 1940s starlet, parading around in her high heels, tailored vintage dresses, and a halo of Joy perfume.

A single mother in West Hollywood at the height of the sexual revolution, she was rarely without an invitation for a night out on the town. As a seven- and eight-year-old, I'd wake up in the middle of the night to an empty house, freak out, and call 911, my grandparents, or both. "Someday you'll understand," she'd tell me exasperatedly when she arrived home, in the wee hours of the morning. She said the same thing as she left me in a locked car in the parking lot outside the Greek Theatre before clomping off in her moon boots to spend hours at a Jeff Beck concert. And when she'd go on her three-month antiques-buying excursions to Europe, depositing me with some struggling actor or hairdresser I'd never met.

When my mother deserted me for good while I was in college, my worst childhood fear came to life. She'd fallen for a 24-year-old South African stuntman and moved halfway around the world to join him. Her departure left me stranded emotionally and financially; my father had been only an erratic presence in my life since my parents divorced when I was small. I had no home to return to and no way to pay for the astronomically expensive liberal arts education my mother had quixotically promised to finance, back when she was dating a British hotel magnate.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Fiscally, I survived (with a vital assist from my father and grandparents), but shortly after my mother moved, I had the first of what would be many panic attacks. At a college party, I fainted in a hyperventilating fit of fear and confusion and had to be carted off in an ambulance. To manage my anxiety, I lurched into problem-solving mode, manically searching for a place to live for the summer break. I hit rock bottom when a manhole cover literally collapsed beneath my feet as I crossed the street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, en route to check out yet another windowless room for rent on the cheap. The ground beneath me had metaphorically given way a long time before; now the physical world was equally unreliable.

More From ELLE

Ultimately, I'd spend nearly two decades in therapy, poking and prodding at my psychic scar tissue. My goal was to feel stronger and more confident, and with insight I hoped to cultivate enough emotional equanimity to break the family pattern of pressing the Destruct button when relationships got tough or boring…or what? I realized at some point that I didn't know how or why the women in my family couldn't finish the jobs they started, so recently I decided to consult the only source with firsthand information about our history: my mother.

My mother spoke about her own mother's departure only in vague allusions, and what little I knew sounded so extreme that it had taken on an apocalyptic cast. So it was with great trepidation that I approached her on the subject, but I needn't have worried. She'd distanced herself so thoroughly from the defining tragedy of her life that her main concern was whether the story was interesting enough. Over the course of an hour, though, she unfurled a narrative that was even grimmer than I'd imagined. First, the basic details I'd gleaned over the years weren't a distortion: My grandmother left my Air Force pilot grandfather when my mother was 14—her siblings ages 9, 7, and 5—and never contacted any of them again, ever.

"She was always bigger than life," my mother began. "She had this magnetic quality that would attract all sorts of people. Men always found her fascinating and attractive. She was raised as a dancer, and she painted and did a lot of other things. I don't think she had anywhere to go with her talents. It was a small environment." My mother trailed off before her voice went slightly metallic; her primary coping mechanism has been to romanticize her mother. "When she was around, initially, I think she was a good mother. But she liked to wander. And when she was there, I don't know if she was totally there."

Before my grandfather died, memories of his first wife began to seep out of him, like non sequiturs in a longer conversation he'd never had out loud. He described his first encounter with Mary Johns at the Olympic Ballroom in downtown Los Angeles, ruefully adding, "Boy, could she move." The dark-haired whirling dervish and the lanky blond Air Force pilot rode their wave of heated attraction into a peripatetic marriage that followed his deployments around the world. And once Sam was called away on flight missions—this was at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis—Mary began to play.

According to my mother, Mary found a captive audience of lonely soldiers on the base, one or another of whom she'd disappear with on assignations that lasted weeks to months. Once, when Sam was stationed in the Philippines, my mother remembers being herded onto an airplane bound for San Francisco with her siblings, with no explanation of why. The next thing she knew, the family was shacked up with her mother's new boyfriend. (Fortunately for my mom, the guy soon left, and the family returned to Sam.)

As the blond and blue-eyed oldest of the bunch, my mother emerged as Mary's stiffest competition for male attention. "She'd buy clothes and say they were for me, but they'd always be her size," she said. "So one time she went away, and I had all the clothes altered. When she came back, nothing fit her." After a while, Mary's adulterous jaunts provided a respite from the tyranny of her narcissism. "She had this big painting of herself over the fireplace, looking very grand," my mom said. "I got so angry with her, I scribbled 'I hate you' across it in black marker."

When my mother described stumbling upon Mary as she was preparing for her final flight, she still stammered in disbelief. Her mother had been gone for nearly a year, touring nightclubs in Florida and the Bahamas with the flamenco guitar player. She'd taken the family car, forcing my grandfather to buy a replacement. That's how my mom knew Mary was back: She came home from school early to see the old Chevy in the driveway. Inside, she found her mother packing in the bedroom while her swarthy paramour stood in the kitchen, idly strumming his guitar. "He looked at me and said, 'One day you'll understand.' " My mom paused, overwhelmed by the memory (not because, by the way, she'd suddenly realized she'd used the same words whenever she left me). "She said nothing before she left," my mother went on. "She just looked at me, and then they got in the car. And that was, uh, the last time that I ever saw her."

My mother became the de facto mom to her siblings until, two years later, my grandfather married a widow with three kids of her own. The family moved into a big house near Lake Arrowhead, in the mountains outside Los Angeles, and formed a John Cassavetes–like version of the Brady Bunch: all angry outbursts and sudden departures. Her stepmom was a salt-of-the-earth war nurse who thought she could heal the casualties my grandmother inflicted. "Boy, was I ever wrong about that" was her refrain over the years, punctuated by an ironic hoot.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Several decades later, when Sam got word that Mary had died and he attended her funeral, he discovered that she had essentially replicated the family she'd fled as if they never existed: She and the guitarist had four children, whom she raised to adulthood, at least as far I can find out.

My mom remained almost clinically clearheaded as she guided me through the waste of her past. But when the conversation turned to her own relationship to motherhood, she became more hesitant: "I was just determined to live my life. And I think I did have that selfish preoccupation with myself, and that definitely had an effect on you, and I can apologize for that."

More From ELLE

When I pointed out that "one day you'll understand" had been her stock phrase whenever, as a child, I protested her leaving, she said she had no memory of it. She did, however, recall how I responded when she told me she was decamping to Africa. "You said, 'Why don't you just make him come here?' It was what I should have done," she conceded. "I didn't know how long I'd be there, and I was in love with him and what he represented…. I don't know. I fell in love with Africa, too—the beauty and the freedom and the open space. Maybe I needed to spread my wings and do something off the charts."

While she initially scoffed when I suggested that she'd repeated her mother's pattern, finally she said: "That actually does remind me of something my mother might have done—just take off for Africa. Maybe I did realize that I was acting like my mother at the time, but it didn't stop me."

There was a man she wanted, she had to have him—collateral damage, oh well. The rejection crushed me anew. If such an affliction exists, my mother was, and is, addicted to love. Although she hasn't had a serious relationship since leaving her stunt-man, she still dolls herself up every day on the off chance that she'll spark with some rake in the stacks at the library, where she has spent the past five years translating a Rilke poem into a screenplay—an epic romance, of course.

I'd always fixated on my mother's moving to Africa as the fount of my feelings of abandonment, but during our conversation, I realized that she'd already been gone throughout most of my childhood—if not physically, then emotionally. In all honesty, the geographical distance from her provided a kind of relief from my delusion that she'd suddenly come to her senses and make me her priority. It was the ultimate parenting paradox: My mother nurtured me by not putting me first.

As for me, I began executing my plan to form a stable family and superglue myself to it shortly after college, when I fell for an older guy whose steadfast integrity was like a rebuke to my mother's waywardness. Three years into our relationship, I got pregnant just as we were hitting our cruising altitude as a couple, and I rushed into marriage and motherhood, believing that this man represented my best shot at excising the family curse.

My preemptive measures failed spectacularly. I spent the first year of my son's life in a bifurcated state of postpartum depression and delirious motherlove. But because I'd had so little mothering myself, I was working without a script for my role in our little domestic ensemble. Meanwhile, my husband took to fatherhood like a musical prodigy given his first instrument. He was a virtuoso dad and was bewildered and frustrated by my undeveloped maternal instincts. When he'd come home and remind me not to leave a pot handle facing out from the stove (not safe!), I felt like a remedial kid accidentally placed in an honors class. I didn't belong, and my self-esteem took a beating.

We were a couple fumbling through the identity-obliterating days of early parenthood, but I had no clue that this was typical. By the time I went away for a work retreat, I was primed to follow the path laid out by my foremothers leading to the first available man. And there he was! A nerdy young poet, who embraced the flawed parts of me that my husband (also a poet, by the way) was forever trying to fix. For all intents and purposes, I never really returned to the marriage.

Yet I was choked with guilt and despair for betraying my husband and the promises I'd made to lash myself, Odysseus-style, to family life. My worst fears were once again playing out. Or as the therapist I finally started seeing at this time—and still talk to via Skype—put it: I was perpetuating a "multigenerational transmission pattern of abandonment and impulsivity." She went on: "The lack of dealing with the pain that's caused [when a child is left] leads to repetition of the pattern, as in the example of your mother. If you've repressed the pain, there's nothing to stop you from repeating it because that's what's been imprinted on your unconscious."

Here's how things play out for me: Phase 1: Lusty ecstatic connection. Phase 2: Hermetic clingy togetherness. Phase 3: Code-red possessiveness. Phase 4: With devotion secured, begin forming exit strategy. To shrink myself some more, I've got a pretty low tolerance for the self-exposure (read: vulnerability) of a close relationship. Once the infatuation dissipates and the jealous blowouts taper off, all that's left is to face the prospect of nakedly attaching to another human—terrifying, because if I'm all the way in with someone, I could be pushed out. I can't know for sure, but maybe my mother and grandmother were running from the same fear of merging, of the risks it entails. Or maybe my mother was right about her own mother, at least, that she fled in part because she felt bored, frustrated by the lack of opportunities available to women of her generation.

Unlike the women who came before me, I did, however, manage to form a powerful bond with my first son, Ethan. Even as I blindly tunneled out of my marriage to his dad, I insisted the poet move from New York to Los Angeles so I could share custody of my son. Which is not to say that my arrested development didn't show through, according to Ethan. "It wasn't like, 'Oh, my mom is constantly fucking up,' " he told me on the phone from his college dorm when I interviewed him. "But you'd have these emotional outbreaks, and it was something I could imagine a 16-year-old girl doing. It was weird for me because I was the kid, and I was like, 'Damn it! I get to be the temper-tantrum one!' "

My son's boyhood confusion about my craziness, and sense that he had to parent me, broke me a little, but then Ethan offered, "You were really open to talking. And we had fun, all the times we were beat boxing together and running around snapping each other with napkins. The dynamic was loose. We'd go camping and fuck up and forget a million things, and it was fun anyway. We did all the stuff you wanted in your childhood at the same time I was getting it in my childhood."

Finally, I got the nerve to ask whether he saw similarities between my mother and me. It was as if he were reading my mind: "I knew you weren't going to bail. That was obvious. There was never any fear of you leaving. That just wasn't in my head during my childhood."

I did it!, I wanted to shout. I really did it! Instead, I thanked Ethan for his candor and listened to him some more, trembling with happiness at a mothering job well enough done. It was as thrilling as if I'd just run off with a flamenco guitar player, or followed my handsome lover to Africa, or lain down with a nerdy poet who whispered love sonnets in my ear. But that's not true: It was better.

The ironic coda to this story is that my second husband, the one with whom I moved to New York, the one with whom I had my second son, and I may well go our own ways. About three months ago, I discovered a love poem he'd written to another woman. And not long after that, he checked himself into a rehab facility for an addiction that had escalated from unnerving to unacceptable shortly after our crash landing in this small town. Perhaps because he felt as uprooted as I, he took his online porn habit into the real world and slept with several women.

So first I married a stable guy, setting the stage for me to become my mother and perpetuate the legacy of leaving. Then I chose someone who was my mom, who couldn't fully commit to me. Maybe that's reductionist, but I know there's truth in it. I also know I've started a new family tradition of constancy, in my relationships with my two sons. I just thank God I never had a daughter.